Download or read book Death Comes to the Ballets Russes written by David Dickinson and published by Constable. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London, 1912, and the famed Ballet Russes have come to London to perform. Anticipation is high, for Diaghilev’s troupe is renowned throughout Europe. At the end of their famed performance of Thamar at the Royal Opera House, the Georgian queen stabs her prince to death and throws him into the river. But life mirrors art when the prince is found truly dead, stabbed through the heart in the orchestra pit below stage. But the corpse is not the dancer in the programme. It is his understudy. Powerscourt is summoned to investigate. But who was the intended victim – the understudy, or the star of the Ballets Russes? And the Ballet Russes are not the only Russian visitors in London this season. Lenin, Europe’s most dangerous revolutionary, has sent some bank robbery money to be changed into pounds. There are stolen jewels from St Petersburg to be sold. And there are other darker forces abroad too and Powerscourt has to look death in the face before he can solve the mystery of Death at the Ballet Russes

Download or read book Death Comes to Lynchester Close written by David Dickinson and published by Constable. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People will kill for a desirable address... When the Bishop of Lynchester visits Lord Francis Powerscourt at home in London, seeking advice about the death of an aged parishioner, Powerscourt advises that discretion rather than accusation is the best way forward - but this is just the start of his association with the diocese of Lynchester. The parishioner's death has left available a property in the cathedral close which the church traditionally rents out to a suitable tenant. Four worthy candidates are nominated . . . and then one of them is found dead in the house, poisoned by strychnine. This time there is no doubt of foul play, and Powerscourt is once again summoned by the bishop. But there are many potential suspects and Powerscourt's investigations lead him to uncover a trail of greed, deception and death which goes straight to the heart of the cathedral itself.

Download or read book The Business of Ballet written by Ira Nadel and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-01-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Business of Ballet: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes between Profit and the Avant-garde explores how a remarkable, internationally recognized ballet company, the Ballets Russes, was able to survive for twenty years without stable funding. Focusing on Ballets Russes’s founder, Serge Diaghilev, and his talent for discovering monies through an uncanny ability to secure funds from aristocrats, industrialists, artists, and swindlers, Ira Nadel offers new insight into the financial life of modern ballet. Throughout [his] analysis, Nadel reveals that Diaghilev was able to attract not only financial support but also the most innovative artistic and musical talents and choreographers of the period, who collectively changed the nature of ballet from the conventional to the contemporary. Through it all, Diaghilev never sacrificed the essential Russianness of his enterprise, transforming Russian traditions by incorporating new and original musical and choreographic stagings. In doing so, Nadel argues, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes revised the idea of ballet as an art form, causing audiences throughout Europe and North America to riot and artists to create revolutionary compositions in art and music.

Download or read book The Ballets Russes and Beyond written by Davinia Caddy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh perspective on the Ballets Russes, focusing on relations between music, dance and the cultural politics of belle-époque Paris.

Download or read book Rene Blum and The Ballets Russes written by Judith Chazin-Bennahum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Blum and the Ballets Russes documents the life of the enigmatic and brilliant writer and producer who resurrected the Ballets Russes after Diaghilev died. Based on a treasure trove of previously undiscovered letters and documents, the book not only tells the poignant story of Blum's life, but also illustrates the central role Blum played in the development of dance in the United States. Indeed, Blum's efforts to save his ballet company eventually helped to bring many of the world's greatest dancers and choreographers--among them Fokine, Balanchine, and Nijinska--to American ballet stages.

Download or read book Diaghilev written by Sjeng Scheijen and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This magnificent new biography of the extraordinary impresario of the arts and creator of the Ballets Russes 100 years ago draws on important new research, notably from Russia. 'Scheijen masterfully recounts the phenomenal way in which Diaghilev contrived, under virtually impossible circumstances, to nurture a sequence of works ... he triumphs in making clear the degree to which, despite the cosmopolitanism of so much of the work, Russia was at the core of Diaghilev' Simon Callow, Guardian 'It's a fabulous, complicated, very sexy story and Sjeng Scheijen takes us through it with a steadying calm that fudges none of the outrage on or off stage' Duncan Fallowell, Daily Express 'Magnificent ... filled with extraordinary glamour' Rupert Christiansen, Daily Mail

Download or read book The Dancer and the Devil written by John E. O'Neill and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communism must kill what it cannot control. So for a century, it has killed artists, writers, musicians, and even dancers. It kills them secretly, using bioweapons and poison to escape accountability. Among its victims was Anna Pavlova, history’s greatest dancer, who was said to have God-given wings and feet that never touched the ground. But she defied Stalin, and for that she had to die. Her sudden death in Paris in 1931 was a mystery until now. The Dancer and the Devil traces Marxism’s century-long fascination with bioweapons, from the Soviets’ leak of pneumonic plague in 1939 that nearly killed Stalin to leaks of anthrax at Kiev in 1972 and Yekaterinburg in 1979; from the leak of a flu in northeast China in 1977 that killed millions to the catastrophic COVID-19 leak from biolabs in Wuhan, China. Marxism’s dark past must not be a parent to the world’s dark future. COMMUNIST CHINA PLAYED WITH FIRE AND THE WORLD IS BURNING Nearly ten million people have died so far from the mysterious Covid-19 virus. These dead follow a long line of thousands of other brave souls stretching back nearly a century who also suffered mysterious “natural” deaths, including dancers, writers, saints and heroes. These honored dead should not be forgotten by amnesiac government trying to avoid inconvenient truth. The dead and those who remember and loved them deserve answers to two great questions. How? Why? The Dancer and the Devil answers these questions. It tracks a century of Soviet and then Chinese Communist poisons and bioweapons through their development and intentional use on talented artists and heroes like Anna Pavlova, Maxim Gorky, Raoul Wallenberg and Alexis Navalny. It then tracks leaks of bioweapons beginning in Saratov, Russia in 1939 and Soviet Yekaterinburg in 1979 through Chinese leaks concluding in the recent concealed leak of the manufactured bioweapon Covid-19 from the military lab in Wuhan, China. Stalin, Putin, and Xi, perpetrators of these vast crimes against humanity itself, should not be allowed to escape responsibility. This book assembles the facts on these cowardly murderers, calling them to account for their heartless crimes against man concluding in Covid-19.

Download or read book The Art of Ballets Russes written by Exhibition Design, Dance and Music of the Ballets Russes 1909 - 1929 (1997 - 1998, Hartford, Conn. u.a.) and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Præsentation af en række balletter illustreret med fotografier og tegninger af kostumer og kulisser, ordnet alfabetisk efter designeren

Download or read book Willa Cather and the Dance written by Wendy K. Perriman and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Pavlova's revolutionary debut in 1910 at the Metropolitan Opera House captivated the nation and introduced Americans to the charms of modern ballet. Willa Cather was among the first intellectuals to recognize that dance had suddenly been elevated into a new art form, and she quickly trained herself to become one of the leading balletomanes of her era. Willa Cather and the Dance: "A Most Satisfying Elegance" traces the writer's dance education, starting with the ten-page explication she wrote in 1913 for McClure's magazine called "Training for the Ballet." Cather's interest was sustained through her entire canon as she utilized characters, scenes, and images from almost all of the important dance productions that played in New York.

Download or read book Ballets Russes Style written by Mary E. Davis and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the two decades between its debut performance and the death of impresario Sergei Diaghilev in 1929, the Ballets Russes was an unrivalled sensation in Paris and around the world. But while scholarly attention has often centered on the links between Diaghilev’s troupe and modernist art and music, there has been surprisingly little analysis of the Ballets’ role in the area of tastemaking and trendsetting. Ballets Russes Style addresses this gap, revealing the extent of the ensemble’s influence in arenas of high style—including fashion, interior design, advertising, and the decorative arts. In Ballets Russes Style, Mary E. Davis explores how the Ballets Russes performances were a laboratory for ambitious cultural experiments, often grounded in the aesthetic confrontation of Russian artists who traveled with the troupe from St. Petersburg—Bakst, Benois, and Stravinsky among them—and the Parisian avant-garde, including Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Satie, Debussy, and Ravel. She focuses on how the ensemble brought the stage and everyday life into direct contact, most noticeably in the world of fashion. The Ballets Russes and its audience played a key role in defining Paris style, which would echo in fashions throughout the century. Beautifully illustrated, and drawing on unpublished images and memorabilia, this book illuminates the ways in which the troupe’s innovations in dance, music, and design mirrored and invigorated contemporary culture.

Download or read book The Diaghilev Ballet 1909 1929 written by S. L. Grigoriev and published by Dance Books Limited. This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Diaghilev Ballet existed from 1909 to 1929; and from its beginningto its end Serge Grigoriev acted as regisseur-that is to say he was responsible for every aspect of the venture save its finance. In theearly 1950s he began reading back among the "logs" of the Ballet'smany seasons, and decided that he would write what no one elsecould write-the story of Diaghilev's extraordinary enterprise as seenby one of its major participants. His book offers a chronology of the Ballet's history, beginning withthe first preparations in St. Petersburg, through triumphs and setbacks in Paris, disaster in the United States, revolution in Portugal, tothe last phase when, cut off from Russia, the Ballet found an official home in Monte Carlo. Almost without exception, the leading European practitioners of music and painting came to collaborate with Diaghilev. Add the names of the dancers, and virtually all the famous figures in theartistic world of the period find a place in Grigoriev's record. Of Diaghilev himself-the strange genius behind this fabulous adventure, the creative artist who could only create in collaboration with dancer-choreographers-a vivid portrait emerges. He underwent every kind of fortune, good and bad, deserved andundeserved, finally refusing to regard himself as a sick man, gambling with death and losing his stake.

Download or read book And Then Came Dance written by Stanley J. Rabinowitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is.

Download or read book Center Center written by James Whiteside and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “James Whiteside is an electrifying performer, an incredible athlete, and an artist, through and through. To know James is to love him; with Center Center, you are about to fall in love.” —Jennifer Garner “A frank examination and celebration of queerness.” —Good Morning America A daring, joyous, and inspiring memoir-in-essays from the American Ballet Theatre principal dancer-slash-drag queen-slash-pop star who's redefining what it means to be a man in ballet There's a mark on every stage around the world that signifies the center of its depth and width, called "center center." James Whiteside has dreamed of standing on that very mark as a principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre ever since he was a twelve-year-old blown away by watching the company's spring gala. The GLAMOUR. The VIRTUOSITY. The RIPPED MEN IN TIGHTS! In this absurd and absurdist collection of essays, Whiteside tells us the story of how he got to be a primo ballerino—stopping along the way to muse about the tragically fated childhood pets who taught him how to feel, reminisce on ill-advised partying at summer dance camps, and imagine fantastical run-ins with Jesus on Grindr. Also in these pages are tales of the two alter egos he created to subvert the strict classical rigor of ballet: JbDubs, an out-and-proud pop musician, and Ühu Betch, an over-the-top drag queen named after Yoohoo chocolate milk. Center Center is an exuberant behind-the-scenes tour of Whiteside’s triple life, both on- and offstage—a raunchy, curious, and unapologetic celebration of queerness, self-expression, friendship, sex, creativity, and pushing boundaries that will entertain you, shock you*, inspire you, embolden you . . . and maybe even make you cry. *THIS IS NOT A BOOK FOR CHILDREN.

Download or read book Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909 1929 written by Jane Pritchard and published by Victoria & Albert Museum. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book was published to coincide with the exhibition Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes 1909-1929 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 25 September 2010-9 January 2011"--Title page verso.

Download or read book Jean Cocteau and His World written by Arthur King Peters and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Apollo s Angels written by Jennifer Homans and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”

Download or read book The Rite of Spring written by Gillian Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story behind the scandalous first performance of one of the most influential works in the history of music, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series. On 29 May 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, a new ballet by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, received its premiere. Many of the cultural big names of Paris were there, or were rumoured to have been there: Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Picasso. When the curtain rose on a cast of frenziedly stamping dancers, a near-riot ensued, ensuring the evening would enter the folklore of modernism. While it was the dancing that triggered the mayhem, Stravinsky's score contained shocks enough, with its innovations in form, rhythm, dissonance and its sheer sonic power. The Rite of Spring would achieve recognition in its own right as a concert piece, and is now seen as one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Gillian Moore explores the cultural climate that created The Rite, tells the story of the creation of the music and the ballet and provides a guide to the music itself, showing how a scandalous novelty of 1913 became a 21st-century concert staple. As well as considering its influence on 20th-century classical composers, she probes The Rite's impact on film music (including scores for Star Wars and Jaws); its extensive influence on jazz musicians (including Charlie Parker) and by artists as diverse as Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and The Pet Shop Boys.